Counterintuitively, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to regard Apple and Google's dominance of app distribution as a weakness that he can now exploit.

Apple and Google are lousy at promoting apps.

The non-obvious chink in the armor is that while Apple and Google dominate the supply of apps — and take a cut of each paid download — they are lousy at promoting and marketing apps.

The marketplace for apps is surprisingly dysfunctional, given that all the players in it are self-described innovators and disruptors of dinosaur capitalism.

The single most important dynamic with Apple's App Store is described by this statistic: There are more than 1 million apps in the App Store. Yet the App Store charts only display about 200 of them at any one time, then only to users who can be bothered to scroll repeatedly down those rankings.

Apple is literally (albeit unintentionally) hiding almost all of the apps available to you.

Google Play is better at search, and it displays lists of 500 apps at a time. But there are 1.1 million apps in Google Play. So you can only see 0.04% of them at a time. You can search for apps on Google, but even if the app company has properly linked their page to an app store download link, users are still several clicks away from actually opening the new app.

This, it turns out, is the problem that Facebook believes it can solve.

Facebook dominates the app world in a way that Apple and Google just don't.

Facebook now owns WhatsApp and Instagram, which have another 650 million or so users between them. Although neither of those platforms is seeded with app download links, they are part of Facebook's massive dominance of the global app user ecosystem. Ignore them at your peril.

And Facebook knows how frustrating app development and distribution can be. Its Messenger and Paper apps are popular, but they're not the global hits Facebook needed them to be. Facebook Camera and Poke are bad memories for the company. Facebook "gets" apps, in other words.

The boring business of generating billions from apps.

Sheryl Sandberg has been trying to explain Facebook's app strategy to Wall Street. Paul Morigi/ Getty Images For months, Facebook has been trying to get people interested in something called "mobile app install ads," and a sibling product that reminds existing users to check back in with their apps. It's arcane stuff, to be sure. Not as sexy as selling iPhones or Androids.

But the business — in which app developers buy ads on Facebook that link to Apple and Google's app stores — has become a huge one for Facebook. About 53% of Facebook's revenue comes from mobile ads. That's $1.4 billion per quarter. Of that, app install ads are a major and growing portion. COO Sheryl Sandberg mentions app ads on every earnings call.

(If there were some venture-funded tech startup in Silicon Valley with a 22-year-old CEO running an app business that powered 145 million downloads a year, and generated revenue in the hundreds of millions, the tech media would be freaking out about it. But because it's Facebook, and Zuck is 29 — ancient! — people shrug and ignore it.)

"It's very hard for a lot of folks to monetize, and something that Facebook is particularly good at is monetizing attention," he says. "So we're going to help folks do the same with their app." Of course, Facebook needs help from developers too. Although the company has successfully — and rapidly — shifted to earning most of its revenue from mobile ads that run on its own apps, it can boost its future even more by moving into third-party apps.

None of this hurts Apple or Google, of course. For every paid app downloaded, both companies will continue to take their cuts. But it's interesting and significant that Facebook can build a billion-dollar business by exploiting the fact that the app store duopoly is basically incompetent at telling people about apps.

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